


Prison Visit

by MeredithBrody



Category: NCIS: New Orleans
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 11:50:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9819164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeredithBrody/pseuds/MeredithBrody
Summary: Merri needs answers about why Robert ordered Emily's death.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foreveranna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreveranna/gifts), [PinkAngel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkAngel/gifts).



> This idea jumped into my head and, as always, Icka and Ana encouraged me to write it so, here we are.

Merri knew that this could possibly be a bad idea, but she needed closure. King had been telling her for weeks that she needed to start moving past Emily’s death. It had been almost 10 years and it was still there, over her head, stopping her from moving herself on. She wanted to know why Robert Nolan had thought that the only way to protect things had been to kill Emily. She wanted to know how his thought process had gone, and how he had justified it to himself. Mostly, she wanted to know all of this before she brought her own children into the world. Waiting in the wings at the prison, she’d been brought through one of the special doors as she was a federal agent, and she definitely had enemies in this prison. “Special Agent Brody, he’s in here.”

“Thank you.” She smiled a little to the young prison officer who had escorted her through to the room. Then she just took a breath and stepped through. It was almost as if the babies could sense her hesitance, as they both stopped squirming and settled down, for the first time in what felt like weeks. As soon as she stepped in she looked over the man who was sat at the table. “Robert, thanks for agreeing to see me.” Damn James had rubbed off on her, when she spoke to him about this idea he’d told her to be polite. Thanking him seemed to be a little too polite though.

“Meredith, I didn’t expect I’d ever see you again.” There it was, that same old calm voice that had told them all to stay in touch after the funeral, that had been so happy when Emily and Daniel had gotten engaged. The same man who had welcomed her family to join his when they’d all first met, and who had managed to make Merri and then James feel at home, even though James had a very different upbringing than the rest, and Merri’s job had taken her so far afield. Yet he had welcomed them all. She never would have imagined sitting across a prison table from him, knowing he was here because he ordered a hitman to kill her sister.

“I didn’t expect to ever come here, but I can’t move on, I can’t forget. I sit up at nights thinking about how, if I’d figured you out, I could have saved Emily.” That was why King had wanted her to come here, he had wanted her to see that it wasn’t something she could have ever prevented, no matter how much she wished that weren’t true. She needed to know why Robert Nolan had been so selfish, so self-important that that was all he could have done. There should have been another way. “Why’d you do it, Robert? Why’d you decide your paper was worth more than Emily's life?”

“I thought I was protecting lives. All our reporters, all our friends. I never thought that Emily would actually die.” Merri had already heard all that at the trial. Though Robert had changed his plea to guilty in the end, providing her with an out, stopping all of her professional decisions being questioned. He had done that for her, but it didn’t buy his forgiveness, and it certainly hadn’t made Merri forget. “It was supposed to scare her, stop her from pursuing it any further.” 

Emily never stopped pursuing a story. Even when she was just on the high-school paper and she’d been pushing for more art supplies. She never dropped anything if she thought it was important, no matter the personal cost. In that sense, she and Merri were exactly the same. They would always fight for what was right, they’d just done it in different ways. “She was a journalist! Nothing scared her off of a story, especially not one that she thought was important.” She couldn’t help but snap, and that reminded her of everyone else who had been hurt by this, everyone else who hadn’t been able to forget about Emily. “Did you even think about how everyone else would be affected?”

“Of course I did! But in my mind the benefits outweighed the cost.” That made Merri shake with anger, and she didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Robert spoke as though he was making some grave personal sacrifice, only he hadn’t sacrificed himself, he’d sacrificed an innocent 29-year-old woman, a member of his extended family at that. Merri really didn’t understand what he was saying, it was such a foreign thought process to her. “You’re going to be a mother, wouldn’t you do anything for your child?” So Robert hadn’t missed the curve of her stomach as she’d sat down, not that she should be surprised by that, he was a journalist too. He wouldn’t miss the details like that.

“I wouldn’t murder someone! Especially not someone who is completely innocent. Who was just doing their job. Their legal, necessary job.” She argued back at that. The hand she had under the table instinctively going to her bump. Taking comfort in the almost immediate reaction from the twins, both of them reacting to the changing light level from her hand. It reminded her that she wasn’t necessarily here for her. She was here for them, and for her greater family.

“Merri… you’ve murdered more people than I have.” There was something about the calm way he said that that made Merri realise that he’d been planning to say that to her. Probably since the day he’d been arrested. A chill ran through her that she desperately tried to ignore, and she hated that he had gotten under her skin so easily. “Yours are just given different descriptors. Mine are victims, yours are suspects.” Was that all it was to him? A distinction. Could he not see the difference between what he’d done out of selfishness and what she did for a profession.

She could attribute at least some of what had happened to him, too. So she took a breath and just started to speak. Quietly, but with purpose. ”You know… I’d never shot anyone before Emily died. Never, and I still didn’t for about 6 months after that. I always tried to use my words but after I lost Emily…” She trailed off for a second, letting him know that everything she’d done since that day had been  _ because _ she lost Emily, because he’d taken her away. Merri wanted him to see how much damage he’d done to her. “I stopped caring that much, so I just did what I was supposed to.”

“How many have you killed, Merri?” The question took her a little by surprise, and she had no idea how to answer that at first. She’d never truly kept count, but she knew all of their names, she remembered all of their faces. Some had far more than she did, but that didn’t stop her feeling guilty about the families of those people who's lives she had ended. She felt their pain, more than any of them could ever know because she never planned on telling anyone. 

“Directly? 11, 3 more have been killed to protect me during situations or operations.” The most recent of those she’d killed, John Russo, he would forever stick in her mind. Robert was reminding her of him right now. The same calculating questions to throw her off balance, the same disregard for the true consequences and, in some ways, the same belief that whatever they had done it had been for the right reasons. Merri didn’t buy any of that. Robert knew what he did was wrong, and Merri was glad that he had, eventually, been caught. 

His eyes didn’t change, nor did his tone, as he tutted his tongue on the roof of his mouth before pretending to act like he had the moral high ground. She was a damn good interrogator, and she knew what was coming next. That was part of her skill. She would continue letting him feel like he had the control, until she was done here. “14 kills. Sort of overshadows my 3, doesn’t it?” That same calm voice, the same what that had been so sad when Emily had died, that had tried to talk her through the case that eventually led to his downfall. How many lies had he told in that voice, how many times had he failed to tell the truth. She didn’t know, but she did know there was a huge difference between what he had done, and what she did. She was going to always be proud of the lives she saved, they numbered in the hundreds. A few casualties were probably to be expected, and maybe he should think about that.

“No, because I killed to protect people, to save others. Something I was good at doing.” She remembered all the conversations, with King and with Gibbs, about how she was a fantastic agent, and about how they were sad to see her leave NCIS. Of course, she’d left for the reasons that were now growing inside of her, but she couldn’t go back to that once they were here. She needed to protect something else now. Something more precious than her job had ever given her. “I never killed out of self interest, and I would rather die than kill an innocent.”

“What makes you think that Emily was an innocent?” Robert’s voice had suddenly lost all of it’s fake warmth. It sounded completely foreign to her, as though a stranger had spoken in place of him. That was when she knew there was no real remorse, nothing that said he would ever truly be sorry for the crimes he had committed, the people he had hurt. He hadn’t cared about any of them, all he had cared about was keeping his newspaper running.

“She was my  _ sister _ . I knew everything about her, and she knew everything about me. She'll never meet my children, my husband. That kills me inside every day. You think that just because Daniel's married now he won’t still think about Emily?” That was one of the things she had wanted to say to him all along. She wanted to point out how much that pain still hurt, how the wound never healed, it just stabbed over for a while, waiting to be reopened. It wasn’t just her that lived with it either, there were so many other people, and he needed to see that. “It wasn’t just her life you ended. It was Daniel’s, it was mine. It was my parents, it was Emily's friends, it was James.”

“I never meant to hurt any of you.” Merri knew, at that point, that this was over. He was never going to apologise, never going to say anything she hadn’t already known. At least she knew that she had done everything she could to work this out. That she had done everything that she could to make sure Robert knew the mess he had made, and how much pain he had caused. She wasn’t sure if it would work, but she had try. Oh how hard she’d tried. “I protected Daniel. That mattered most to me. I didn’t care who else I hurt, as long as he was alright.”

“He wasn’t though, was he? Goodbye Robert. I don’t know what I came here for, and I don’t know if I got it. But I need to leave before I do something I’ll regret.” What she’d do, she wasn’t sure, but she knew enough martial arts that she could do some damage without even breaking a sweat. Stopping at the door she turned back and said what she hoped were the last words she’d ever say to him. “I hope you live a sad and lonely life.” She then pressed the button by the door, and was relieved when she stepped out to see King stood right outside the door. Of course he’d followed her out here, and of course he was waiting for her when she was done. She almost collapsed into his arms as he held them out for her. She wasn’t sure if she felt any better, but now at least she knew, it would have happened no matter what she’d done. That was no real comfort, but it was something.


End file.
